Tribute To Abram S. Kagan

When the Bulletin became the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association it was as a matter of course that its publisher should continue to be International Universities Press, the publishing house founded and headed by Dr. Abram Kagan. IUP was far and away the premier publisher of psychoanalytic literature in the United States and Dr. Kagan was as eager for the new journal to be a success as were its founders. The great majority of IUP's titles during the time Dr. Kagan headed it with his daughter, Irene Guttman, were in the field of psychoanalysis. IUP continues to be a leader in the field to this day.

Dr. Kagan was a remarkable man with an extraordinary life story. He was born in czarist Russia to a wealthy family in a society that discriminated against him because he was a Jew. (The English cognate of Kagan is Cohen; there is no “h” in Russian.) He nevertheless received a full university education through a combination of innate intelligence, indomitable courage, and patient toil.

As a young man he established himself in St. Petersburg where he was a member of the Socialist intelligentsia. It was there that he began his career as a publisher, mostly of scientific works, though he also published the works of writers and poets of the time. During the few months of the Kerensky government in 1917, after the Czar had been deposed and before the Bolsheviks under Lenin took over, he was actively engaged in politics as a member of the ruling Socialist (Menshevik) party. After several turbulent years he and a number of other intellectuals were expelled from the new Soviet Union and he made his way to Berlin with his wife and young son. Though without funds of his own, he was able, with the help of some relatives in Germany, to get on his feet financially and to become, in time, a publisher of books translated into Russian from other languages, mostly German. These works were distributed in the Soviet Union, freely though technically